The semiconductor integrated circuit industry has experienced rapid growth in the past several decades. Technological advances in semiconductor materials and design have produced increasingly smaller and more complex circuits. These material and design advances have been made possible as the technologies related to processing and manufacturing have also undergone technical advances. In the course of semiconductor evolution, the number of interconnected devices per unit of area has increased as the size of the smallest component that can be reliably created has decreased.
The semiconductor integrated circuit industry has produced numerous developments in effort to continue the process of scaling. One of the developments is the potential replacement or supplementation of the conventional planar metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor by the vertical field-effect transistor. However, existing vertical field-effect transistors have not been satisfactory in every respect.
The various features disclosed in the drawings briefly described above will become more apparent to one of skill in the art upon reading the detailed description below. Where features depicted in the various figures are common between two or more figures, the same identifying numerals have been used for clarity of description.